The Work of Humiliation: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Checkpoints, Borders and the Animation of the Legal World

The policing of checkpoints demands a commitment from the soldier. These commitments are realized, as Robert Cover says of legal judgments, in the flesh of those subject to the policing and of those who police. Such commitments are sometimes difficult to maintain in the face of arbitrary policies an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLaw and critique Vol. 28; no. 2; pp. 215 - 233
Main Author Rogers, Juliet Brough
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.07.2017
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Animation
Arbitrariness
Borders
Boundaries
Cultural Studies
Education
Gender Studies
Human Rights
Humiliation
Identity
Jokes
Law enforcement
Legal History
Legitimacy
Obedience
Philosophy
Philosophy of Law
Police
Psychoanalysis
Theories of Law
Torture
Sovereignty
Humiliation
Psychoanalysis
Checkpoints
Israel
Northern Ireland
Borders
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Summary:The policing of checkpoints demands a commitment from the soldier. These commitments are realized, as Robert Cover says of legal judgments, in the flesh of those subject to the policing and of those who police. Such commitments are sometimes difficult to maintain in the face of arbitrary policies and even arbitrary re-locations of checkpoints and borders. Obedience is required, but obedience is not simply an act of acceptance. This article employs a psychoanalytic lens and the work of animation theory to consider how obedience is legitimated in the minds of those who police borders and how practices of humiliation toward civilians at the borders function both to display the uncertainties about the regime’s legitimacy, and to aggressively depict this legitimacy in the flesh of those subject to the borders. This depiction, I argue, employs understandings of time, identity and the question, and these are then employed as techniques of humiliation. These techniques evoke a rhetorical landscape located somewhere between Freud’s discussion of the work of jokes and Scarry’s discussion of torture; between these two points is the promise of a legal world where there are only angels and devils and where these figures are animated in the flesh of both civilian and soldier.
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ISSN:0957-8536
1572-8617
DOI:10.1007/s10978-016-9195-y